


Maybe This Christmas

by ChancellorGriffin



Series: Five Red Dresses: A Collection of Kabby Christmas Eve AU's [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Journalism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, Christmas, Christmas Eve, F/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 11:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5455460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanity Fair journalist Raven Reyes hauls her ass back out to rural Massachusetts where she FINALLY gets that interview with Marcus Kane she's been dying for. Sequel to the Kabby AU "The Woman That Fell From the Sky." Takes place one year later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe This Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Woman That Fell From the Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3936322) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin). 



### Chapter Text

**_Maybe This Christmas:_ ** **Marcus Kane Finally Ties the Knot**

**By Raven Reyes for _Vanity Fair_**

_A little over a year ago,_ Vanity Fair _journalist Raven Reyes broke the story about Abigail Griffin, the small-town Massachusetts doctor better known to Marcus Kane fans as “The Woman,” the elusive muse behind Kane’s biggest hits.  Griffin, her daughter Clarke, and Kane’s producer Thelonious J consented to be interviewed for that story.  Kane did not._

_Until now._

_Hot on the heels of his Billboard-charting Christmas album, and with the rumors of his engagement to Griffin all over the tabloids, Marcus Kane finally agrees to tell his side of the story._

* * *

 

Abby Griffin is only _slightly_ more willing to let me inside than she was the last time I was here.  

She knows I’m here at Kane’s invitation, which means she can’t say anything, but a year’s not long enough to forgive the journalist who showed up on your doorstep and announced that the only way to shoo away the mob of vultures circling the carcass of what was once your personal life is to tell one of them your entire life story in harrowing detail so she can print it in her magazine and watch newsstand sales climb three hundred percent that month.  (There are many women to whom this would be flattering.  Abby Griffin is not one of them.)  So she greets me politely, but with reserve, and the minimum amount of warmth for good manners.  

I don’t blame her.

Oh, I should also mention that it’s Christmas Eve.

Kane’s PR team and I have been going in circles trying to schedule this and it’s been like herding cats.  I can go anywhere, I tell them.  I can do any time.  Day or night. I will buy a plane ticket.  I will rent a car.  Just tell me where to find Marcus Kane for a window of time long enough to interview him and get Nate to snap a few photos.  “We don’t need wardrobe or a stylist,” I say desperately.  “They can be candids.  Nate can be done in twenty minutes.”   _Please, please,_ I beg Jesus or Santa Claus or the Holiday Armadillo or the Great Pumpkin or anyone who will listen, after every new round of emails, _find me two hours alone with my tape recorder and Marcus Kane before my print deadline and I’ll never ask you for anything ever again._

So it’s possible that at least some part of Abby Griffin’s annoyance as she ushers us inside is because it’s five o’clock on Christmas Eve and I have exactly two hours before they have to be dressed and out the door for family dinner and Midnight Mass.  

And this isn’t just any Christmas dinner.  The big sparkly princess-cut Tiffany emerald (Abby doesn’t like diamonds, I learned from _People_ Magazine last week) we’ve all been ogling in grocery checkout lines and at the hair salon is as impressive in person as it is on magazine covers, and the wedding is set for next June.  Which means that, even though they’ve been  . . . well, _something_ for over two decades, this is their first Christmas as an official couple, and they’re doing the thing that newly-official couples all over the world are dreading right along with them.

Marcus Kane is meeting his fiancee’s parents.

Clarke is with her grandparents already, and Abby disappears to shower and dress while Kane - still in jeans and a black t-shirt - leads me out onto the covered back porch where we can talk with some privacy.  It was spring last time I was here, I tell him, trying to make small talk as he sets down a mug of tea for each of us and gestures for me to sit across from him on one of the two wicker armchairs.  Clarke and I drank coffee on the sloping lawn that runs down towards the creek.  It’s all iced over now, the tree branches heavy with snow.  The porch is closed in, with a little gas heater, so even though we’re inside a glass box looking out at a winter wonderland, we’re cozy.  

I’m babbling a little - about the creek, about the snow, about Clarke - because I’m not quite sure where to begin with Marcus Kane.  I’m not quite sure why, after twelve months of near-weekly interview requests which had become a formality between my assistant and his agent, suddenly out of the blue he said yes to one.  

Why he said yes, specifically, to _me._

“I don’t read my own press,” he says without looking at me.  I nod.  I know this, obviously.  We all know this.  Everybody knows this.  Most celebrities claim they never read their own press, but Marcus Kane really doesn’t.  His social media presence is nonexistent.  (Clarke’s the one who had to explain to him what Tumblr is.)  “But I read your article about Abby.”  

I tense up slightly, feeling a bizarre hybrid of flattered pride, and the sensation of being sent to the principal’s office.

“I was furious at first,” he says.  “Not at Clarke.  Or at that blogger kid.”

“At me.”

“At you, at the notion of using the most important relationship in my life to sell magazines, at this bizarre industry where I sit through market research presentations charting the correlation between my personal life and my record sales . . . “  He takes a long drink of his tea and looks off in the distance, towards the creek.  “You know that’s why Thelonious wanted a holiday album, right?  It’s because of Clarke and Abby.  I’m a ‘family man’ now.  Apparently,” he says dryly, “we’re rebranding.”  

I ask him - though I think I already know - how he feels about that.  He shrugs.  

“I’m the same person I always was,” he says.  “And so is Abby.  We just have less privacy now.  I’m not quite sure how that translates to the idea that people want to hear me sing Christmas songs, if they didn’t before, but that shit’s not my job, I guess.  My job is to show up and sing.”

“So you didn’t want to do the album?”

He laughs.  “Just the opposite,” he says.  “I _always_ wanted to do a Christmas album.  But Thelonious spent decades talking me out of it.  It didn't fit my image, he said.”

"Not cool enough," I suggest.  "Christmas albums aren't sexy."

“Exactly.”

“But now you’re getting married, so he’s okay with it?”

“So it seems."

“You don’t seem furious at me anymore,” I observe, gently guiding him back on topic (and away from a road that could end with me fielding frantic calls from his publicist; artists aren’t supposed to talk this frankly about the gap between their brand and their real identity).

“Oh,” he says, startled, as if remembering.  “No.  No, I’m not.  I like you,” he says.  “You’re smart.  You followed the clues.”

“You like me because I tracked down Abby?”  This is a puzzling turn of events.

“Not _those_ clues,” he said, shaking his head.  “You’re the first person in the whole world to hear what you heard in those songs.”  He looks at me then for the first time, really looks at me, and I know I have a boyfriend and his fiancee is upstairs getting ready for him to meet her parents at church on Christmas Eve and I’m here to do a job because I’m a _professional_ , dammit, but for about thirty seconds I get so lost in those big dark eyes that I temporarily forget my own name because _Marcus Kane is looking right at me._  “You’re the first person in the whole world,” he says, “to notice that she’s inside the music too.”  He smiles at me, and the twelve-year-old girl inside me starts losing her shit (Marcus Kane at Madison Square Garden was my first concert, okay?).  “I thought you were just looking for the gossip,” he continues.  “I think that’s what Abby thought too.  But you weren’t, were you?”

No, I tell him.  I wasn’t.  I’m a journalist, and his music is my specialty, and revealing the identity of The Woman is the kind of scoop that makes a career, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I wanted my name on that cover article.  But that wasn't really why I came looking for Abby Griffin.  It was because the depth of his love for her weaves through his music in a way that has captivated me my whole life, and I wanted to know the rest of the story.  Not for _Vanity Fair_.  Not for a future book deal.  Not for my resume.  For me.  I just wanted to _know._

“You were looking for the story inside the music,” he says.  “Did you find it?”

“Half of it,” I say.  “I only got to talk to her, remember?”

“And Clarke.”

“And Clarke.”

“And you never stopped wanting the other half,” he says, smiling, “which is why my agent gets a call every ten minutes from someone in your office requesting an interview.”  I can’t deny the truth of this.  “All right, then, Raven Reyes,” he says.  “I’m here.  Ask me anything.”

So I asked him the question I’d been longing to ask him ever since Abby Griffin told me the story of the night they first met - the night his old friend Jake showed up to Kane’s show at a seedy underground New York club to sit in the front row with a dark-haired girl at his side.

“When did you know?” I ask him, and he says exactly what I hoped he’d say.

“The very first moment I saw her.”

* * *

All Marcus Kane knew, when the lights came up on that tiny stage, was that Jake was sitting at the table in the front row, and a girl with sad dark eyes was sharing the table with him.  She was sitting beside Jake but somehow apart from him, a vast empty space between them that gave Kane a faint stirring of hope.  She didn't look at Jake.  They didn't speak to each other, or touch.  They appeared to be strangers.  Just a man and a woman forced to share a table in a crowded bar.  And so Jake disappeared from Marcus' mind.  So did everyone else in the room.  Everyone disappeared except the girl.

Kane didn’t know then that the table of men in suits at the back of the hall were the A&R team from City of Light Records.  He didn’t know he was being scouted. He didn’t know, when he walked out onto that tiny stage, that he was about to play the most important set of his life.  The entire world had shrunk down to the size of the space between him and the dark-eyed girl in the front row.  She and his guitar were the only things in his world that existed.  He sang every song to her.  Even when he shifted his gaze to look around the room (he’s a consummate showman, Marcus Kane, he knows all about the power of using your eyes to keep the audience engaged) he could feel her watching him.  Sometimes - not often, not enough to attract attention, not enough to excite anyone's notice - he allowed himself the luxury of looking straight into her eyes as he sang.  

He was singing to her.

There was no way she could not know he was singing to her.

They were alone inside an island of light in the middle of a dark sea, and he sang about loss and hope and redemption and sex and faith and love, and he watched the music soak into her skin and stir her to the depths of her soul, and as the lights went down and she faded into the darkness, the last thought in his mind was -

_I’m going to marry that woman._

But when he came out the stage door to the street, fighting his way through the crowd of shrieking girls, she was nowhere to be found.  

He would not see her again, or even learn her name, until three weeks later, when Jake would call him up and invite him to an Italian restaurant in Nolita for his engagement party.

A waiter saw the bottle of wine in his hand, tied with a silver ribbon, and pointed him towards the back of the crowded restaurant, where he was told he'd find the happy couple.

And there she was.

He stood there for a long moment, waiters and busboys darting all around him, eyes fixed on that white leather banquette in the farthest corner where a crowd of twentysomethings drinking champagne gathered around a beaming Jake Griffin and the girl in the red dress at his side.  

Was she happy?  Did she look happy?  He couldn’t tell.  She was smiling a quiet, private smile, she was nodding and exchanging pleasantries with the guests who approached the table, but she wasn’t radiating the same boisterous joy as the man with his arm draped around her shoulder.

Then - it was just like in a scene from a movie - there was a moment where the crowd of waiters and diners and party guests shifted as one, for no real reason, and opened up a clear sightline from the white leather banquette all the way to the front entrance where Marcus stood hesitating on the doorstep, very nearly about to turn and bolt before he was spotted.

But it was too late. 

Abby looked up just then, and saw him.  And he saw her right back.

“And then,” says Marcus to me, in a faraway voice, “time just . . . stopped.”

For a long moment, they just looked at each other.  They knew everything.  Their faces, their hearts, were completely unmasked to each other.

_I’ve been looking for you for weeks and now that I’ve finally found you it’s too late for me to say what I wanted to say,_ his pleading eyes told her.

_I’m about to marry a man I love and everything was straightforward and simple until you sang to me, and now I can’t see anything clearly anymore,_ her eyes said back.

“Marcus!” exclaimed Jake, looking up just then and waving him delightedly over.  “You made it!  Guys, this is my friend Marcus.  Everyone scoot over, make room, you’re gonna want to meet this guy,” he announced to the crowd as Marcus, his quiet escape now impossible, reluctantly made his way towards the table.  “He’s a musician and he’s fucking _talented as shit_ and he’s gonna be mega-famous someday.”  Jake grins widely at Abby.  “I just love this guy,” he says happily, waving Marcus into the seat next to him.  Abby can’t say anything to this, just watches helplessly as Marcus awkwardly seats himself on the soft white leather with Jake Griffin between them.  “By the way,” says Jake, “I didn’t get to introduce you properly last time.  Marcus, this is Abby.  Best girl in the world.  She's gonna be my wife.  Abby, this is Marcus.”  He slings his other arm around Marcus’ shoulder and calls out to the waiter.  “More champagne!” he shouts.  “This is the best night of my life.”

If you had been there in that room, and you could read minds, here’s what you would have seen.  

Abby looked at the man next to her, and the man next to him, and she thought about the years she’d already spent with Jake Griffin, how deep and comfortable and rich their love already was, how happy it made her to think about the unfolding of their future together, how very much he was the exact person she’d been looking for all her life.  She thought about the unhurried familiar comfort of their lovemaking, the way what perhaps it had lost (and would continue to lose) over the years in adventure and newness was more than made up in how intimate, how reliable it was, how by this time they knew each other’s bodies so well that they could make each other come without even having to think about it and then drift off peacefully to sleep in each other’s arms.  She thought about his cheesy jokes and his foot massages after she came home from double rotations at the hospital and what an amazing father he would someday be and the way he had stood up in the middle of her med school commencement ceremony and woo-hooed so loudly as she received her diploma that the people around him started to give him dirty looks.  

Then she thought about the dark-haired man with the guitar and the way he had looked at her as he sang, like he was the first person in the whole world who had ever really seen her, and she looked at his hands, fidgeting nervously with a fork on the table, and she thought about those hands on her and inside her, and she took a long drink of her champagne to try and swallow down the dangerous, shivery-sweet sensations echoing through her body.

Marcus Kane’s thoughts were no less painful or complicated.

He thought for a long time, as he turned a heavy silver fork over and over between his fingertips to give his hands something to do, about the flash of tanned thigh he could just make out in the corner of his eye where he could see her crossed legs on the other side of Jake, and he thought about how convenient it would be right now to be the kind of selfish, heartless person who didn’t care about Jake or his feelings or the slim gold band on Abby’s ring finger.  He thought about how easy it would be to find an excuse to switch seats, to reach down a hand concealed by the heavy linen tablecloths, to slide it up her silky thigh and underneath that red dress.  He thought about how good she would feel.  He thought about the way she had watched him sing, so serious and intent, seeing straight down to the core of him, and he wondered if that was how she would look at him in bed.

And then he thought about childhood summers chasing Jake through the sprinklers and sledding down the hill at the end of the lane when it snowed, and he thought about the way it felt to stand in the middle of the street as the Griffins’ station wagon pulled away, hauling a trailer behind it, leaving behind the house that now had a “For Sale” sign in front of it.  He remembered Jake waving at him from the back seat of the car, and the way he waved back, swallowing down the sting of tears because he was twelve and twelve-year-old boys weren’t supposed to cry, not even if their best friends were moving all the way across the country and they might never see each other again.

And so he took a long drink of his own champagne, and he closed the door on Abby’s red dress, and he turned to Jake with an easy smile, handed him the bottle of wine with the silver ribbon, and said, “Congratulations.  Tell me everything.”

* * *

Jake never knew.  

That much they’re both sure of.  

The connection between them grew harder to ignore with each passing year, and they both reached a place where they could no longer deny to themselves their own feelings.  But neither of them loved Jake any less.  Neither of them could bear to hurt him, to disrupt the careful balance of their lives.

Then Clarke came along, and from the moment the tiny, pink-blanketed bundle was put into Kane’s arms, on the hard orange hospital couch where he’d slept the entire night to make sure Abby was all right, and those big blue eyes looked up at him with a puzzled, inquisitive expression, Marcus Kane loved Clarke Griffin more than he ever thought he could love anything in his life.  Which made everything, of course, both better and worse.

Then the unthinkable happened.

Jake Griffin’s sudden, unexpected death was the most horrifying thing that had ever happened in any of their lives, and it slammed down an iron wall between Abby and Marcus so impenetrable that both of them confidently expected they would never see each other again.  How could they?  How could either of them bear it?  How could they ever again allow themselves to remember the afternoon they were lazily strolling through Manhattan, very nearly holding hands, very nearly permitting themselves to think about kissing each other, while Jake Griffin was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance with a gunshot wound?

Marcus knew it wasn’t logical to blame himself, but he did anyway.  When Abby packed up her entire life and left the city, he was not even surprised, and as much as it broke his heart to think about never seeing her again, it felt like that suffering was no less than exactly what he deserved.  _Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife,_ he said to himself.  This was his penance.

Then the only thing more unthinkable than Jake Griffin getting shot in a bank robbery happened, and after the towers came down Marcus Kane's steely resolve snapped in two.  The only thing in the entire world that mattered now was holding Abby and Clarke in his arms.  If this was how the world ended, then let it.  But not before he had the chance to tell Abby that he loved her.  So he threw some things in a bag and ran through the dust of lower Manhattan to his car and he got out of the city as fast as he could.  He drove and drove and he didn’t stop driving until he was at her doorstep, and then she was in his arms.

And that's where she stayed, for fourteen years.

* * *

It’s the quintessential New York-ness of Marcus Kane’s life story, I think, that’s always resonated so deeply with me.  The childhood house on a cul-de-sac in Queens.  The years of carrying his guitar case on the subway.  Trying to make it as a musician in the city’s dive bars and underground clubs.  Hitting the big time and walking through Midtown underneath the surreal sight of flashing Times Square billboards of his smiling face.  A loft in Tribeca, a house in the Hamptons.  And a love story told through music that began with a guitar and a song and a dark-eyed girl on the other side of the spotlight, then ended in a Nolita Italian bistro, then began again on the day we all thought the world was ending.  

We might be sitting in Massachusetts inside a glassed-in porch drinking tea while deer wander on the other side of a frozen creek, but Marcus and Abby could only have happened in New York.

I hear high heels on wooden stairs just then, and realize we’re out of time.  Abby knocks on the door and tells Marcus he needs to go get dressed or they’re going to be late.  He nods agreeably, shakes my hand, and thanks me sincerely for my time.

“Merry Christmas, Raven Reyes,” he says to me as he heads up the stairs to put his suit on, and Abby leads me to the door.

“Did you get everything you wanted?” she asks me, not accusatory but curious, and I turn back to her halfway down the porch steps.

“Do we ever?” I ask her, a little dryly, and she smiles a secret little smile that’s not intended for me, and all I can feel in that moment is grateful.  For the man with the golden voice who’s upstairs right now putting on a tie to go meet his future mother-in-law.  For the woman in the red dress standing in bare feet on a snow-covered porch, and her golden-haired daughter.  For the chance to bear witness to the kind of love story most of us have ceased to believe really exists.

But it does exist.  It’s real, and it’s here, and it’s enough of a Christmas miracle that even a cranky atheist Jew like me can’t explain it away.

Sometimes we _do_ get everything we ever wanted.  We have to suffer to earn it, maybe; we have to prove ourselves worthy first, before it's given to us.  We have to choose friendship and fidelity over selfishness and desire.  We have to make our own family by holding onto the people who matter most.  We have to find a way to say the things that can't be said, using nothing more than a few guitar chords and the voice the Lord gave us.  We have to choose love, always, every time.  We have to chase it down as hard and fast as we can when it gets away and cling to it like a drowning man in a shipwreck once it's within our grasp.  We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

Marcus Kane and Abby Griffin never had it easy.  None of this dropped into their lap from the heavens.  It's hard damned work.

But miracles, it turns out, do happen.

* * *

_**Raven Reyes is a rock critic, journalist, pop culture commentator, recreational mechanic, dog lover and certified obsessive expert on the music of Marcus Kane.  She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Kyle Wick, their cat Anya, and a completely insane record collection.** _

**Author's Note:**

> Read the original fic here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/3936322
> 
> Listen to the Christmas playlist here: http://8tracks.com/grrlinthefireplace/maybe-this-christmas


End file.
